Imagine working almost everyday, for six months, on one particular thing. Now imagine waking up and that one thing is gone. That happened to me…almost.
In June of 2015 I began working on a new novel. By late October I had finished the first draft, and it had gone through two rounds of editing. All that remained was a couple weeks of worth addressing my editor’s final comments. I was on schedule to publish around the first week of 2016, and super pumped about it.
Then my computer died
After an epic road trip down to Florida I was sitting in my grandmother’s sun room (aka “Florida porch”) making notes for the final edit.
When I get my editor’s final notes I like to read through every one of her notes, and then make notes about her notes. Sounds complicated, but essentially in one window is my Microsoft Word document with the notes showing in the right column, and in another window is a plain text editor with a list of “to do” items.
I know some people would prefer working off one single document, but I have a huge monitor and prefer working in side by side windows. And normally this wouldn’t be an issue, but two days before my dad and I were planned to leave Florida and drive back to Oregon, my computer died.
I love the cloud
I’m very tech savvy, so I spent the next few hours taking the entire laptop apart. And if you’ve ever taken a laptop apart you know it’s nothing like taking a desktop tower CPU apart. It’s much, much worse…
The computer was under warranty; that wasn’t the issue.
The issue is that ASUS will not guarantee any restoration of documents on your hard drive when the hard drive is damaged. And guess what…all the notes I took over the last few weeks were on my hard drive.
Luckily, my wife and I have very specific systems in place for document storage. This meant that my actual manuscript was backed up in two places:
- A portable hard drive. Every document on our computer gets backed up to a portable hard drive monthly. Unfortunately this was in Oregon with month old documents.
- Dropbox. Our super important documents are kept live on Dropbox.
Unluckily, or rather stupidly, I didn’t back up the detailed notes I had been making for the past few weeks to Dropbox 🙁
My heart literally hurt
A day later I mailed my computer back to ASUS, and a day after that my dad and I started our long drive back to Oregon.
Not only did I not have my notes, but now I didn’t even have a computer to work on.
To put this into perspective, imagine driving to work everyday only to find out you’re locked out of the building. You’re still expected to get all your work done, but you have zero access to your office.
That’s what it felt like, except worse.
If I ever had to do re-work in the past it sucked. But…as an engineer it was very straight forward. I just had to plug in the formulas the same way I had previously.
Now, as a writer, as a creative, there are no formulas. I couldn’t just re-do all the ideas I had for each chapter. The specific ideas, and phrases, and scene changes were all gone.
Two months behind
As of yesterday I finished the final edit of my new book, more than two months behind because of all this.
I can’t begin to express how terrible it felt to sit and stare at a specific chapter, knowing that a month ago I had this great idea written down, and now I had to come up with a new one altogether.
All I can say is I’m really thankful I had my manuscript backed up on Dropbox.
Note: If you don’t currently use any cloud storage, or have been wanting to try one out, Dropbox is 100% FREE up to 2 GB. If you sign up via this link, then they give me an additional 500 MB for each sign up, and I will love you forever 🙂
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